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I'm trying to make my 97 years old grandma's laptop(Ubuntu 20.04) more accessible for her. She often is frustrated because text that she has written in LibreOffice Writer vanishes. Disabling the touchpad and using an external mouse already helped a lot. But I suspect that she still accidentally selects text, when she tries to place the text cursor with her mouse(by dragging or double-clicking). When she continues typing the selected text is being overwritten. Because she needs to focus on the keyboard while typing she won't notice immediately what happened – making it difficult to "Undo".

  1. Would it be possible to disable this behavior in LibreOffice Writer so that selected text would be deselected instead of replaced, when typing?
  2. If changing the behavior is not possible, can I disable text selection via mouse in general?

Thanks for any technical hints or other ideas on how to address this! Possible answers might involve hidden LibreOffice settings/workarounds or instructions on how solve this via custom script/extension.

Note: To narrow this down this question is about how to solve this problem in LibreOffice Writer specifically. I also asked this question for Thunderbird's message compose window and as a question on askubuntu.com for a system-wide solution.

Anton S.
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  • I am sorry you have had no reactions so far, as I think this sort of thing can help many older users (though admittedly most of them are probably just on MS Windows or smartphones) — and I see you got somewhat more help at https://askubuntu.com/questions/1288732/accessibility-tweak-how-to-prevent-accidentally-selected-text-from-getting-repl . – PJTraill Aug 14 '22 at 15:52

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